Anne Lindbergh, Part 3 of 3: on the Pressures of Connectedness

“Modern communication loads us with more problems central than the human frame can carry,” wrote Anne Morrow Lindbergh, even of her life in the 1950s. I struggle with this tension, sometimes, both wishing to get away from the bombardment of news, and reveling in it, feeling lost without it.

Moreover, as a mobilizer, my job is to try to wake up the sleeping beauty that is the American church to the world outside her borders. So, I feel deflated when I meet Christians who boast (almost) about not having a television, or not watching the news, or not sending their kids to public school. These can be very appropriate defense mechanisms but at times they also seem to reflect a harmful tendency to think good Christians should not engage with the world. What a loss, on both sides!

And yet, I recognize the problem it creates to know and care about things far away.

“It is good, I think, for our hearts, our minds, our imaginations to be stretched; but body, nerve, endurance, and life-span are not as elastic. … Our grandmothers, and even – with some scrambling – our mothers, lived in a circle small enough to let them implement in action most of the impulses of their hearts and minds. We were brought up in a tradition that has now become impossible, for we have extended our circle throughout space and time.” Gifts from the Sea, p. 124.

We do seem to need those experiences that re-center us, that allow us to disengage with the world and renew ourselves. What Lindbergh does not mention in the book, you may know: Anne’s husband was the famous pilot and explorer Charles Lindbergh. Following the tragic, high-profile kidnapping and murder of one of their children, they moved to Europe for protection and privacy, only to be driven back by the onset of World War II. At the time she wrote this book Anne was raising her five remaining children and trying to live a quiet life. With such a household I imagine it was seldom quiet.

“America, which has the most glorious present still existing in the world today, hardly stops to enjoy it, in her insatiable appetite for the future. Perhaps… we are still propelled by our frontier energy… Europe, on the other hand, which we think of as being enamored of the past, has since the last war, strangely enough, been forced into a new appreciation of the present. The good past is so far away and the near past is so horrible and the future is so perilous, that the present has a chance to expand into a golden eternity of here and now. Europeans today are enjoying the moment even if it means merely a walk in the country on Sunday or sipping a cup of black coffee at a sidewalk café.” pp. 126-127

Are these dynamics still true of America, of Europe? More true, or less?